Previously on the Anjelica Huston chronicles: “A Story Lately Told,” the first of her two-volume memoir. In it she writes of an enchanted, if lonely, youth on an Irish estate, of puppies and piglets, of poring over a collection of Charles Addams cartoons and of her favorite childhood pastime: posing in front of the bathroom mirror pretending to be Addams’ slinky ghoul, Morticia. The account ends with the death of her mother and of Huston becoming a top model, decamping from New York for Los Angeles to escape an unstable lover.

“Watch Me,” the second volume, opens at an LAX baggage carousel in 1973, where the six-footer with the raven hair and bird-of-prey profile correctly intuits that in the land of the blond, fashion bookings for her will be few. Her memories are sensory and evocative. She remembers the intoxicating scent of tuberose and the silky touch of a horse’s coat. The color of a dress is not green, but “goose-turd green.” She is the daughter of Hollywood royalty, director John Huston, and struggles to find a title of her own.

In short order the striking and worldly 23-year-old becomes the consort of a Hollywood prince, actor Jack Nicholson. After some years as a fashionista and scenemaker, she becomes an actor like her grandfather Walter Huston. She wins an Oscar for her performance as Maerose, the gimlet-eyed Mafia princess in “Prizzi’s Honor,” directed by her father — making John the first filmmaker to direct both a parent and a child to Academy Award wins.

She writes with a conversational intimacy, inhabiting the role of the new best friend who shares just enough to make you want more.

She doesn’t want to get parts because of her connections. At 19 she had starred in her father’s disastrous “A Walk With Love and Death” and had learned her lesson. After dedicated study with teacher Peggy Feury, she learns that acting is about imaginative sympathy.

Still. The famous are different from you and me. The shindigs Huston goes to are immortalized in songs like Joni Mitchell’s “People’s Parties” (“All the people at this party, they got passport smiles.”) Her intimates are boldfaced names — Nicholson and Ryan O’Neal — one who loved her but wasn’t faithful and the other whom she says she left after he hit her.

She is self-critical about her emotional neediness and equally perceptive about others. Of O’Neal: “There was a molten quality to him, as if his engine ran too hot.”

Nicholson, who reminds Huston of her womanizing father “without the vodka edge,” is a “deep and serious person.” Nicholson belatedly learns that the woman he thinks is his sister is in fact his mother. “He takes things harder than you would imagine or than he would want you to know,” she writes. “In part because of the early experience of everyone in his family lying to him about his birth, it is not surprising that he’s quite cynical.”

Some girls are born with silver spoons in their mouths; Huston is born with a flotation device under her rump. For modeling gigs and to accompany Nicholson on movie shoots, she jets to Rome, London and Paris. Aspen is her playpen, New York for more serious fun. On her way to a star-studded soiree in the Village one Halloween, she gets “caught in the gay parade ... and was almost run over by a giant latex penis.”

She is always in the right place at the right time except that night she walks into Nicholson’s house and Roman Polanski is in the Jacuzzi with a girl. When the police come the next day, Huston is arrested for possession of cocaine and Polanski for sexual assault of a 13-year-old. Because there was no search warrant, Huston is released.

When she accepts a small part in Elia Kazan’s “The Last Tycoon,” he gives her an acting exercise. She is to knock on the door of co-star Ingrid Boulting and react to what she encounters. Boulting greets Huston with mascara-smeared tears streaking down her face. Huston suddenly becomes aware that acting is not just the projection of one’s own character but also reacting to the others in the ensemble. “Until that moment I had been living in my own head,” she says. “I had not even considered the other character’s state of mind.”

Soon after she is at a party where a guest is the director Tony Richardson. “Poor little you,” he says to Huston. “So much talent and so little to show for it. You’re never going to do anything with your life.” She responds: “Perhaps you’re right.”

She thinks: “Watch me.”

John Foreman, her father’s producer, believes in her talent. He recommends her for small gigs, like “Ice Pirates” (1983). And suggests that she work for her father in “Prizzi’s Honor” and “The Dead,” two exceptional performances that establish her talent and range. (She can do accents as well as Meryl Streep but rarely gets the credit.) Still, she is insecure. She auditions for a role in “The Witches of Eastwick” that goes to Cher. When Huston gets the call about playing her childhood role model, Morticia Addams, she wonders if Cher is in the running. She nurses her father through his dying from emphysema.

Huston has a remarkable run in the 1980s and 1990s, with surprising performances as the crone in the Roald Dahl story “The Witches,” the frontierswoman in “Lonesome Dove,” the Holocaust refugee in “Enemies: A Love Story,” the Mob bag woman in “The Grifters” who has unfinished business with son John Cusack, and the paramour of ophthalmologist Martin Landau in “Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

Living parallel lives on different film sets, Huston and Nicholson drift apart. When he tells her he’s expecting a baby with Rebecca Broussard, she decks him. For Christmas, he sends her a diamond and pearl bracelet given to Ava Gardner by Frank Sinatra with a card that reads, “These pearls from your swine.”

Apart from a date with Prince Albert of Monaco and the occasional on-set flirtation, she shares little about her private life after Nicholson. Just before her 40th birthday in 1990, she meets Robert Graham, the Mexico-born sculptor and public-art luminary. Like Diego Rivera for Frida Kahlo, Graham designs a house and studio that gives them separate work spaces and joint living space, overlooking the Pacific in Venice.

They enjoy a productive 15 years together, with Graham doing a major commission for the Cathedral of Los Angeles and Huston directing films such as “Bastard Out of Carolina” and working for the likes of Woody Allen (“Manhattan Murder Mystery”) and Wes Anderson (“The Royal Tenenbaums,” “The Life Aquatic”). Incrementally, Graham’s health fails.

Engaging and laced with mourning, Huston’s memoir has a coda of which her father would be envious. I won’t spoil it for you, but what the medium said is damned funny and I absolutely believe every word.